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World Press Photo show offers a crucial world view, says Montreal spokesman

Author of the article:

Susan Schwartz • Montreal Gazette

Publishing date:

August 28, 2018 • 4 minute read

Alexandre Champagne calls the World Press Photo exhibition, which travels to 100 locations in 45 countries, "an annual privilege check" for people who have a great deal — and may not necessarily realize it. Photo by Mariphotographe./ MONwp

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When photographer Alexandre Champagne learned that six men, all fathers, had been killed at Quebec City’s Great Mosque, first he cried.

“My own daughter had just turned one,” he recalled of the Jan. 29, 2017 shootings, which left 17 children without fathers, “and I felt I had a responsibility to use my visibility to raise money to try to help them.”

World Press Photo show offers a crucial world view, says Montreal spokesmanBack to video

He owed much of his visibility to the Trois fois par jour food and lifestyle blog/cookbook/magazine mini-empire and to his photographs of food, table settings and of Trois fois co-creator, pop singer Marilou Bourdon. The two, who married in 2014 and brought daughter Jeanne into the world in 2015, were household names in Quebec. They separated last summer.

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The day after the shootings, Champagne started a GoFundMe campaign “in the name of a united and open-spirited Quebec” to provide financial support to the mosque’s leadership to spend as they saw fit. He promoted the campaign on Instagram and Facebook and, in short order, raised more than $45,000.

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Earlier this year, he did a series of portraits taken in the aftermath of the tragedy — quiet but penetrating photos intended to offer a window into the souls of subjects, as he put it. Some of those portraits will be on display during the World Press Photo Montreal 2018 exhibition, which opens Aug. 29 at Bonsecours Market.

Champagne, 32, is this year’s spokesperson for the annual international exhibition, sometimes dubbed the Oscars of the photojournalism world. To determine the 125 prize-winning photos of 2017, a jury considered more than 73,000 images submitted by nearly 4,550 photojournalists in 125 countries.

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In addition to the 125 prize-winning photos of 2017, the World Press Photo show will also feature some of Champagne’s portraits of the Quebec City mosque shooting, including Aymen Derbali. Photo by Alexandre Champagne /MONwp

Photography has been a part of life for the Quebec City native since he was a boy and his father taught him how to take pictures. He admires photojournalists — it was his dream for a long time to be one himself, he said — and has attended the exhibition since it first came to Montreal in 2006.

“Every year when I go, it takes me three weeks to just cool down and say to myself that I don’t have to go to Afghanistan to take pictures,” Champagne said.

To him, the exhibition, an initiative of the World Press Photo Foundation which travels to 100 locations in 45 countries, serves as “an annual privilege check” for people who have a great deal — and may not necessarily realize it.

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“You get a sense of what is going on around the world,” he said. “Here in Canada, the roads may not be great, but we have very good lives.”

He said he hopes that those who attend “go home and reflect for a moment on what you saw. It shows you what is wrong in the world. For many people, life is very hard.”

Becoming a father “really opened my eyes to different social issues and gave me more confidence in trying to talk about them more publicly,” Champagne said.

He is disturbed, for instance, by what he sees as an absence of equality in wealth distribution. “I think it’s completely ridiculous for a person to have seven cars when there are people dying because they don’t have enough to eat,” he said.

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Champagne and Bourdon are divorced, he has sold his share of Trois fois par jour and is no longer involved — “I have taken so many pictures of bagels,” he said — but he is still a photographer. He has opened a studio in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

He plans to continue giving a popular workshop on taking photos with a cellular phone: He has a book on the subject coming out in September, L’Art de réussir toutes ses photos avec son téléphone cellulaire (Les Éditions Cardinal).

And in addition to commercial photography projects, Champagne has committed himself to philanthropic work. To raise awareness about the work of Moisson Montréal, for instance, he hung out at the country’s largest food bank for nine days on his own time, observing and photographing clients, volunteers and employees.

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“I wanted people to know about Moisson Montreal and the problem, which is that there are people who don’t have food to put on their tables.”

Champagne’s grandparents were on welfare and there were no family portraits, he said. To help people for whom such portraits are unaffordable, he is offering photography sessions free of charge to those on employment insurance or social assistance, single-parent families and people who have completed treatment for substance dependency issues.

AT A GLANCE

World Press Photo Montrealopens Aug. 29 at Bonsecours Market in Old Montreal, 325 de la Commune St. E., and runs to Sept. 30. Hours are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday, to midnight Thursday through Saturday. Admission is $14, $11 for students and seniors, free for children under 12, and $8 for people in groups.

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